MANITOWOC - After receiving recognition from the American Hospital Association for excellence in health care, Holy Family Memorial will be partnering with Silver Lake College and Leede Research in a “five-year initiative to advance Manitowoc County.”

The initiative is called Vision 2022, and will be led by Leede Research CEO Dean Halverson and Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity President Dan McGinty.

“We are excited about galvanizing the leadership of this community,” McGinty said. “There are many people in many facets of this community that have worked and what we are trying to do is bring that work together and have a unified approach.”

Vision 2022 will focus on bringing businesses, government, social groups and other facets of the community together to focus on key issues for the county.

“What we are hoping to do with this process is to create a structure and an environment that accelerate a lot of the good things that are going on,” Halverson said. “There is a lot of stuff happening in Manitowoc County, not just in our health care arena, but also in community planning going on in a variety of levels — downtowns, parking and the whole development of the west side of Manitowoc.”

McGinty and Halverson announced the initiative during a celebration at Holy Family Memorial Hospital Thursday. During the celebration, Kim Byas Sr. from the American Hospital Association presented Holy Family Memorial CEO Mark Herzog with a plaque as a token of appreciation for Holy Family Memorial’s commitment and leadership in the health care field.

“We really appreciate our relationship with the American Hospital Association because they have served for so many years to help improve what hospitals do in this country and as an extension of our philosophy for doing right by our communities and innovating,” Herzog said.

In 2017, Holy Family Memorial has received two national awards — one for performance in following guideline-based heart care and the other for being a healthy workplace. They were also named most wired hospital by Hospitals & Health Networks magazine, were in the Top 100 Great Community Hospitals in the U.S.A. by Becker’s Hospital Review and the Top 100 Rural and Community Hospitals in the U.S.A. by iVantage Health Analytics and The Chartis Center for Rural Health.

Herzog said the number of awards and recognitions reflect Holy Family Memorial’s philosophy of giving patients the right care they need.

“Top care, right here in Manitowoc, for a community this size is unheard of,” Herzog said. “In a lot of ways, organizations like ours aren’t supposed to exist anymore. Our organization works to take care of the community, and you all here are our reason for being. We don’t serve a corporate initiative from somewhere else.”

Herzog announced a series of talks from local business leaders called the HFM Innovation Exchange that will take place between December 2017 and April 2018. The series will feature four sessions to showcase local businesses that are being innovative and creating a positive impact on the community.

“There is a lot more that we can learn from each other and, in the course of that learning, we can get more excited about the future as well,” Herzog said.

The first presenter will be Kenlyn Gretz, president and CEO of Americollect, a local collections center whose business model prides itself on being “ridiculously nice.” The rest of the lineup has yet to be announced.